Dunban67 said:
JWeinCom said:
Eh... what?
I'm not sure how the APU could have cost Sony 3 billion dollars to develop. First off, it's not a Sony chip. It's made by AMD. Sony may have kicked in some money, 3 billion seems way over the top. Secondly, I see no reason for such an insane budget. It's not a particularly customized chip. I actually wouldn't be surprised if the Wii U chip, which is highly customized, cost more. For a point of reference, the development budget for the cell processor, a proprietary processor that was way ahead of its time, was reported by two of its developers to be 400 million. There is no way that a fairly standard non proprietary chip would cost such a high amount.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/112644/Report_Sonys_Cell_Dev_Cost_400_Million_Aided_Microsoft_Tech.php
And IF Sony actually paid that much, then they are a terribly terribly mismanaged company. From 2001-2005 (the golden years of the PS3) Sony made just about 2.5 billion in profit from its gaming division. Sony would have to make more than double that on the PS4 to just break even. In its best years, their gaming division did about a billion, usually closer to half a billion in the years where they didn't post losses. Even if Sony matched their peak years for the next 6 years, they would barely turn a profit on this thing.
So, do you have any sources for any of this? Because those figures seem bat shit crazy.
Edit: For both FY 2014 and 2015, Sony spent a bit over 4.5 billion on R&D. That is not the gaming division. That is for everything they do in the company. Very unlikely that the PS4 accounted for (if we assume a four year development time with your 6 billion figure) about 1/3 of their R&D budget for 4 years.
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What is the source fothis graph? I don t think it is acurate as the profit loss for Sony and MSFT gaming divsions were not "broken out" during these years- This graph has ben around a while and seems to be taken as fact but there is no way it could be and i doubt the Sony or MSFT part of it is remotley acurate
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I do believe that I've seen this one backed up by financial figures... but you can ignore the chart if you want. Instead, we can use recent numbers.
In 2014 Sony lost 78 million http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-05-14-sonys-game-division-reports-full-year-loss
In 2015 they made 400 million http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/sony-posts-record-5-74-bil-annual-loss-playstation-division-reports-2-8-bil-loss/
This is accounting for the profits made from PS3 and Vita as well. Going by the 6 billion figure, they'd have about 5.6 billion dollars until the break even point, and more to account for marketing. It's kind of unlikely that will happen.
